What is the Difference Between Application Designer and Phire?

The company I work for has Phire implemented already but the debvelopers are not using it yet. They are using App Designer. My question is, from a Code Deployment/migration point of view, what is the main difference of the tools? I haven't used Phire at all so I am not sure what to expect from it. I am doing the code migrations for the developers and would like to know from your past experiences, what do you think about Phire? How much better is it from App Designer? How did it help you? Any information is greatly appreciated!!

I haven't used Phire, but I have used STAT, which is a similar project. The main advantage to a configuration management software product is version control. This gives you the ability to see what has changed over time, and should also give you the capability to go back to a prior version of the object if necessary.

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I haven't used Phire, but I have used STAT, which is a similar project. The main advantage to a configuration management software product is version control. This gives you the ability to see what has changed over time, and should also give you the capability to go back to a prior version of the object if necessary.

The basic difference between Application designer and Phire architect is as follows:

In Application Designer the PS admin have to manually perform tasks for migrations to target database.

In Phire architect, the migrations are initiated from a Change Request (CR). Once a migration request is created, a button appears in the CR which allows the migrator to perform the migration of the objects in the migration list (including files) to the target database.

In Application designer the involvement of PS admin team comes into Picture where as in Phire the developer can handle the migration workflow till final production release.

The important thing to keep in mind is that with Phire Architect, the set of workflow tasks is completely configurable. So you have complete control over the number of steps required to complete the migration.

The Major advantage of using PHIRE architect is that the look and feel of the PHIRE architect GUI and working is similar to PeopleSoft Pages and hence the user has a comfort level using it.

It has a very well structured workflow and hence change control and reporting of Peoplesoft objects is managed efficiently. We have been using PHIRE around 1 year and PS Admin team is at ease because the number of migration requests were used to be huge and hence tracking of it was difficult.

Now each developer manages its own work although final migration to production rights are with PS admin team only.

Phire is a more streamlined tool for project migration. You will be able version control the projects using phire. Also with phire you can easily roll back the changes.

Another advantage with phire is that you will be able migrate files and other programs. Also you have the ability to execute scripts with phire tool.

Phire allows you to define a migration path, such as from Dev environment > UAT environment > Production environment. And you can migrate the whole projects + additional files + execute scripts in all the environments with single click making the migration experience seamless. Phire even captures and saves compare reports between the migration stages. Above all phire will detect code/object collisions between the projects and alert the users before it is actually migrated to an environment.

In addition to all the above you can define your own approval rules, there by restricting the migration process to limited users based on your company requirement.

If you ask me, I prefer to use Phire over the delivered app designer mechanism for migrating projects and objects.

Like Don, we use Stat. If Phire is anything like it another big advantage is migration of file objects; cobol, sqr's etc. In multiple server environments, be it 1 nt and 1 unix or multiple nt and multiple unix, it will migrate the files to all environments in one step.

1. Object Locking: Once a migration set is created and that contains an object shared by other developers, they can't make any changes to the same
unless the object is released by the first developer. Common objects like 'Role' or 'sqr' changes.

For this the common object to be migrated by the developer who completes the task at the end.

2. For a minor change of any one of the objects including the external files, the project needs to be failed/returned by the chain of people in
the process like 'QC'/'DBA'/'Release Manager', etc.

There will be lot of dependency in the form of hierarchical approvals to reach the final migrating authority. In the sense, any re-migration
caused by a minor change, needs to be approved by all before it reaches the final migrater i.e. Release Manager or DBAs.

3. There will be lot of documentation like BRFD,TDD,Unit Test Plan, Standards review etc to be attached at each step of migration. In my view
it is more detail and time-consuming.

Still some people take it positive in view of its version control and where auditing is strictly followed.

App Designed is the actual development tool to customize or modify delivers code and objects like records, pages, components, menu, App Engine, PeopleCode, etc

PHIRE as I understand is a migration tool that allows taking snapshot of code and objects as they exist within various instances of PeopleSoft. It uses objects modified thru App Designer.
It can also be used for migration workflow steps and/or document tracking for testing results, etc.

To the best of my knowledge, it was not a development tool allowing one to make changes or create a brand new object in PeopleSoft.

"1. Object Locking: Once a migration set is created and that contains an object shared by other developers, they can't make any changes to the same unless the object is released by the first developer. "

You're telling me object locking and version control is a disadvantage?

You should be comparing Phire to PeopleTools Change Assistant (and Update Manager if you getting close to 8.53). If you already license Phire and have it implemented, I don't see why you wouldn't use it. We use CA for all migrations (Oracle delivered bundles and our own customisations), and it's great but it doesn't handle version control, rollback or track the status of the package. We use subversion and jira for that. CA still needs an experienced person to manage the migration.